Syria’s ghost war could end up haunting us

Afghanistan casts a long shadow over our attempts to help those rebelling
against Assad, says Shashank Joshi

By Shashank Joshi

6:37AM BST 06 Aug 2012

Foreign powers did not invent Syria’s uprising, but they are certainly helping it along. In recent months Turks, Arabs and Americans have embraced the rebel cause, pumping in a thickening flow of weapons and helping to discipline the once ragtag insurgents into a force that grows more potent by the day.

The Gulf state of Qatar has mobilised its special forces to provide logistics and training, as it did in Libya. Saudi Arabia has gone further, helping to set up a new command centre in Adana, a Turkish city 60 miles from the Syrian border, to oversee the provision of training, intelligence and arms to the Free Syrian Army, the name given to the loose rebel network of local militias and anti-Assad defectors. President Obama, having watched warily at first, has now signed a presidential “finding” that authorises greater covert, albeit non-lethal, assistance.

As Assad’s forces encircle Aleppo and bomb its neighbourhoods from the air, it’s easy to understand why such decisions have been taken. But proxy wars carry risks, and even those of us who are sympathetic to the rebel cause must recognise this. The shadow of Afghanistan, another country where Saudi Arabia and the United States cooperated to aid fragmented rebel forces, hangs over present-day Syria. Those efforts, labelled “ghost wars” by the journalist Steve Coll, succeeded in toppling a government, but also contributed to decades of instability, emboldened radical Islamist groups, and had consequences far beyond Afghanistan’s borders.

To be sure, Syria has some advantages. Afghanistan was occupied by an atheist, foreign power, the Soviet Union. Syria is not under occupation, so jihadists will have a harder time mobilising others to their cause. And whereas the staging ground for the Afghan war was Pakistan under General Zia ul-Haq, a man committed to the Islamisation of his country and the export of extremism, today’s conduit is the moderate and modern-minded Turkey.

Yet this does not wash away the problem. Saudi Arabia, perhaps the rebels’ foremost benefactor, is hardly a beacon of democracy and human rights. It has a track record of backing the most extreme and theologically austere groups. Although some rebels adopt merely the outward appearance of religious conformity – beards, prayer, rhetoric – to get access to Saudi cash, others are true believers, particularly those who have joined the fight from outside Syria.

There are several reasons why this should concern us. First, it calls into question whether the Syrian National Council, the hapless opposition in exile, can deliver on its promises of a pluralistic, democratic state free from sectarian prejudice. Can Turkey ensure that its command centre is not used to funnel arms to those whose primary interest is in enforcing harsh religious rule on an unwilling population? Perhaps so, although the nature of a covert war is that things remain regrettably opaque.

Second, Saudi support frightens Syria’s minorities. Alawites, who are being unfairly identified with the crimes of a regime led by their fellows, are scared of revenge attacks. Christians, who remember the fate of their co-religionists in Iraq, are worried that Saudi Arabia’s medieval views of religious freedom will be the model for the new Syria. These groups could either be pushed into the embrace of the regime, or arm themselves, making it even harder to build a unified state after Assad falls.

Saudi Arabia, whose primary interest is to give a bloody nose to Assad’s ally Iran, is probably indifferent as to whether Syria dissolves into sectarian chaos – but we should not be. We should know whether there are accountability mechanisms in place, so that rebels committing attacks against minority neighbourhoods are punished, or at least cut off from support.

The third problem is that proxy wars are prone to oozing out of their boundaries. Weapons handed over to fight Assad can be used for other purposes, many against Western interests. This is about intangible know-how as much as actual arms. As the rebels rely more and more on improvised explosive devices, the diffusion of bomb-making skills is unavoidable. The militants who honed their talents on American tanks in Iraq are turning their attention to Syrian armour, with devastating results. But what if Jordan or Turkey are the next targets?

Finally, which part of the opposition should get support? Foreign powers have to pick favourites, but each country has different criteria. The Saudis want the most pious. The Turks want to keep out the Kurds. The Americans like the liberals. The existence of a joint command centre suggests at least some consensus, but the danger is that each country builds up its own clients and drives wedges between different groups. It is important that Saudi-backed Islamists are not the only ones with guns – but the response must be designed to minimise fratricidal divisions. In 1990s Afghanistan, it was infighting between different mujahideen factions that laid the ground for the Taliban’s rise.

Of course, many of these problems would exist anyway. After all, most weapons are probably coming from private networks, like Islamic charities and diaspora communities, not governments. And abandoning the rebels to their fate would carry its own risks. But ghost wars are unpredictable. Those of us who have called for greater support for the rebels must not wish away the associated hazards.

Shashank Joshi is a research fellow of the Royal United Services Institute